Hardware
At CES 2019, the Tuesday keynote by IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, walked attendees through the IBM lens of core areas of computing: and one of the four was quantum computing—which comes as no surprise for those who have been following ...
Computer Sciences
A new startup called Zapata Computing has launched with the intention of creating and selling software for quantum computers. Representatives of the new company announced to the press that they have already received $5.4 ...
Engineering
Ferroelectric semiconductors are contenders for bridging mainstream computing with next generation architectures, and now a team at the University of Michigan has made them just five nanometers thick—a span of just 50 or ...
Feb 6, 2023
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Engineering
Georgia Tech materials engineers have unraveled the mechanism that causes degradation of a promising new material for solar cells—and they've been able to stop it using a thin layer of molecules that repels water.
Dec 20, 2023
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125
Computer Sciences
Cybersecurity researchers and analysts are rightly worried that a new type of computer, based on quantum physics rather than more standard electronics, could break most modern cryptography. The effect would be to render communications ...
Dec 21, 2018
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24
Electronics & Semiconductors
Silicon has been the semiconductor material of choice for electronics pretty much since the transistor effect was first observed and identified nearly 80 years ago. There's a valley in California named for it, after all.
Mar 8, 2018
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358
Computer Sciences
A team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has designed and commissioned the production of a computer chip that implements post-quantum cryptography very efficiently. Such chips could provide protection against future ...
Aug 4, 2021
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740
Electronics & Semiconductors
Many state-of-the-art technologies work at incredibly low temperatures. Superconducting microprocessors and quantum computers promise to revolutionize computation, but scientists need to keep them just above absolute zero ...
Sep 16, 2022
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105
Electronics & Semiconductors
Waves, whether they are light waves, sound waves, or any other kind, travel in the same manner in forward and reverse directions—this is known as the principle of reciprocity. If we could route waves in one direction only—breaking ...
May 21, 2020
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140
Electronics & Semiconductors
Semiconductor materials are the foundation of modern electronic, photonic, photovoltaic, thermoelectric and many other semiconductor devices, which are integral for computers, mobile phones, gadgets, home appliances, cars ...
In physics, a quantum (plural: quanta) is an indivisible entity of a quantity that has the same units as the Planck constant and is related to both energy and momentum of elementary particles of matter (called fermions) and of photons and other bosons. The word comes from the Latin "quantus", for "how much." Behind this, one finds the fundamental notion that a physical property may be "quantized", referred to as "quantization". This means that the magnitude can take on only certain discrete numerical values, rather than any value, at least within a range. There is a related term of quantum number.
A photon is often referred to as a "light quantum". The energy of an electron bound to an atom (at rest) is said to be quantized, which results in the stability of atoms, and of matter in general. But these terms can be a little misleading, because what is quantized is this Planck's constant quantity whose units can be viewed as either energy multiplied by time or momentum multiplied by distance.
Usually referred to as quantum "mechanics", it is regarded by virtually every professional physicist as the most fundamental framework we have for understanding and describing nature at the infinitesimal level, for the very practical reason that it works. It is "in the nature of things", not a more or less arbitrary human preference.
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